Cello Recital; Hommage à Pablo Casals

With this program Yorick-Alexander Abel honors the unsurpassed cello legend Pau Casals who as a Catalan is mainly known under his Spanish name Pablo Casals. When 97 years old Casals died in Puerto Rico he had made the cello as a solo instrument more popular than anyone else-and he had won worldwide respect and affection as UN ambassador for peace and uncompromising opponent of Franco's dictatorship who survived him for two years.

Pau Casals was the son of a Catalan father and a Puerto-Rican mother. After World War II he went into exile in Puerto Rico. Yorick- Alexander Abel is the son of a German father and a Cuban mother with Catalan ancestors. His parents live in Mexico. It is more than the European-Creole ancestry that links Abel with the legendary Casals, it is also the conviction in the power of the spiritual message, and of course-as with all the cellists-the love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach whose six suites for cello solo were recognized as the peak of cello literature due to Casals's celebrated performances and recordings.

"Hommage à Pau Casals" is a journey between epochs and styles, a journey with many cross connections. Bach's first suite for cello solo as a centerpiece is framed by two improvisations by Yorick-Alexander Abel: the opening "Lampes de Sagesse" (premièred in Tunis in 2000 and related to oriental music) and the closing "Sagesse Amérindienne" (premièred in Paris in 2010 and, as the title suggests, related to the indigenous music of America and maybe even to America's pre-Colombian past). These improvisations are to be experienced as evocations of the magic of sound and the power of melody. Christoph Schlüren wrote about Yorick-Alexander Abel: "He is an aristocrat of his instrument, a musician whose play reflects his deep spiritual yearning for transcendence, grace, fantasy, naturalness and meditative contemplation that take the listener into a boundless inner world."

The second main emphasis of the program is the "Suite in D minor for Cello Solo" by Enric Casals (1892-1986; in Spanish: Enrique Casals), a work he composed-himself at a ripe old age-in 1973 in remembrance of his late elder brother Pau Casals. The suite, with its four movements, stands in the tradition of Bach's suites but its language is unmistakably Catalan and originated in the 20th century. In its versatility this suite merges gracefulness, elegance and élan, sincerity and depth, and in its mournful "Elegía" we perceive a tender melancholy that moves us deeply. Enric Casals was a violinist, composer and conductor who had studied in Brussels with the Ysaÿe pupil Mathieu Crickboom and the leading Belgian composer Joseph Jongen, then in Prague with the Nikisch pupil Frantisek Suchy, and who had stayed in Catalonia after his brother's emigration, where he would later found the Pablo Casals Institute. Furthermore he supported his brother by orchestrating his magnum opus as a composer, the oratorio "El Pessebre" (The Crib), a work he quotes in the "Elegía" of his suite for cello solo.

"Paduana" by the Franco-Swiss composer Arthur Honegger was written in 1945 immediately after the war. This piece that translates the baroque processional dance Pavane into the contemporary world was originally conceived as first movement of a suite that was never been completed. In its solemn concentration it ranks among Honegger's most significant chamber music works.

The final piece of the "Hommage à Pau Casals" is Pau Casals's famous miniature "Cant dels Ocells" (Song of the Birds), an arrangement of a Catalan Christmas carol that the cellist performed all over the world and that has become popular as "hymn of peace", being regarded in the same time as the Catalan secret national anthem.